365 days of SL, day 361

It occurred to me a while ago that through this project, I've been in sims starting with all manners of letters, but never one starting with a Z. I doubt this would've changed on its own, too, so I decided to look into whether I could force the issue; fortunately it turned out there's a zim.. err, sim called Zebrasil right in Jeogeot Bay. There's usually a crowd there, too, and I've always been curious why, so we went on a little adventure and swam over.

It felt good to do that again, too. We've done it before; way back on day 39, we went and explored Michael Linden's home, situated near the volcano island first featured on day 31, and on day 73, we swam past the island and atoll and looked at what else one might find in Jeogeot Bay1.

I greatly enjoyed it then, and I did again last night; there's something about it that feels like proper exploration, and the world of SL feels more natural and organic there than the Linden roads and clearly-segregated land parcels often do. (There are exceptions, of course, areas where the world's much more integrated on the land as well, where everything feels much more like a coherent whole.)

We made our approach to the volcano island — got out of the water on the south beach and shook ourselves dry like good wolves, then dipped back into the ocean after all in order to avoid the lava. In reality, you probably still wouldn't have wanted to swim there, but since this is SL, it was all fine. :) (Indeed, stepping ON the lava would've been fine, too, but it's fun to go along.)

And then we took a look at the atoll and the gathering spot there in Zebrasil. It turns out that it's an infohub (I'd link to the wiki page, but the knowledge base article it redirects to has been deleted); a gathering spot with information for new residents, sporting a tiki-ish theme that fit the surroundings quite well and I thought was very nice; a lot of people were gathered there, as usual, but nobody seemed to interact with anybody else, and my own greetings that I offered were summarily ignored as well.

I wasn't offended, but I was and still am a little bemused. Several people on SL either have no social skills or choose not to use them, perhaps on the mistaken assumption that common courtesy etc. does not apply when you're interacting with people on the Internet as opposed to in other ways, but why do people gather somewhere if they're not interested in actually doing anything? I can't claim I understand it.

So after looking at the place for a while, we got our leave on and jumped back into the warm waters of the ocean with a splash. :)

Along the way back, we noticed an large ship in the distance, so we took a small detour to take a look at it. It was an aircraft carrier, but without any aircraft, alas. The green item in the background is a buoy belonging to the Second Life Sailing Association — one of these was already seen on day 20, and there's a bit more background in the post for day 39.

BTW, take a look at the reflections in these screenshots, too, especially the second one — aren't they nice? And yes, that white thing in corner of the last screenshot is my left paw. :P

(Click for larger — 1920x1033 PNG, 2642 KiB)

And after this detour, we finally headed back to Lordshore to spend the last few minutes of the evening basking in the sun. :) The funny-looking object in the background is the sculpture featured on day 152, BTW, and the wooden platform was seen on day 102 (you can even see the volcano island in the distance there!). And if you're looking for another perspective on Lordshore bridge, check out day 41.